


you can come through

by moodmaker



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Friends to Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:20:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27427819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodmaker/pseuds/moodmaker
Summary: After four years in limbo, Renjun finally gets a co-pilot. He just doesn't expect it to be Donghyuck.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Donghyuck | Haechan
Comments: 58
Kudos: 221
Collections: '00 FIC FEST ROUND TWO





	you can come through

**Author's Note:**

> please note lots of inconsistencies with pacrim canon re: the nagasaki shatterdome and the academy being moved to shanghai, general rules of drifting, etc.
> 
> my infinite gratitude to di for putting up with my constant complaints about this thing for months on end and yet still helping me edit/troubleshoot/stay motivated/melt into a puddle when i needed it. i am forever lucky to know u <33
> 
> written for prompt #00147, title from 9 - willow, sza, accompanying playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Kktjo8qYOhrcHw0bA5qa4?si=MsqmZVS6Qxe_ipEf_JFlQw)

And memory  
which outruns the body &  
grief which arrests it.  


— _Statuary,_ Katherine Larson

In the years that’d passed after the first Kaiju made landfall on San Francisco’s shores, Renjun’s become a pretty firm believer in karma.

(“Never pegged you as the religious type,” Jaemin drawled once, late at night after they’d snuck into the combat room together. You’d think the academy would actually encourage excess training, given the nature of jaeger piloting, and yet they locked the doors to the place each night at twelve on the dot without fail. Said there was no point in working themselves to death if they weren’t going to do it out on the water. No matter—Jaemin only had to flash a smile before the janitor agreed to look the other way.

“I’m not,” Renjun huffed, twisting his arm into such a sharp angle that for a second he thought it’d pop out of its socket. That would’ve been the second time that day—he’d already gotten his ass handed to him during class earlier. He wasn’t keen to repeat it. “Karma is about _balance._ ”)

Case in point:

Chenle flags him down at the canteen, teeth glinting wolfish in the light.

“We’ve got new blood,” he announces, plopping his tray down on the table. “Heard it straight from the Marshal.”

There's always new blood. Circulation is good for the body, even if the body is the PPDC and the only reason they need so much new blood is because they lose half their Rangers every time the war clock resets.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Renjun yawns.

Chenle responds by jabbing him between his ribs. Renjun’s almost offended that he manages to do it, but not for long—violence is merely a permutation of love. If not love, then fondness, at least. He’ll trip Chenle on their way out.

"It's Donghyuck."

Renjun sucks in a breath unwittingly.

Last month, Tailspitter trudged out of the East China Sea and tore out the chest of Shanghai’s last defender. The neural bridge collapsed instantly. White sparks exploded from the wound and sizzled into the ocean. No one could drink from the tap for two weeks straight afterward because of all the Kaiju blood spilled. A minor inconvenience, given that Chinese people boil their water anyway, but the media was still outraged.

Renjun didn’t have the luxury of mourning; he’d been promoted to replacement Ranger before the jaeger was even out of the water. _A risky move,_ wrote the tabloids, _as Recruit Huang is infamous for never having tested Drift-compatible with anyone else before. Is the PPDC growing desperate after the United Nations publicly threatened to slash their budget again? Who am I kidding, of course they are—they even promoted the dud. Maybe I’ll get a promotion too, ha ha. (Really though, I’ve been working here for five years. They don’t even bother editing my articles anymore. Boss, are you seeing this? Because—_

By that point Renjun had stopped reading.

As if in response, today the PPDC brings in Donghyuck: top of his class four years ago, snapped up from Jeju at eleven by the Marshal himself, lauded as the future of the jaeger program, and practically guaranteed eternal fame and glory until Kojiyama broke his kill streak by piercing the hull of Chrome Brutus and leaving her stunned off the coast of Tokyo.

In the aftermath he'd been decommissioned and relocated to Conn-Pod control, where he ran training simulations in relative obscurity. It was the kind of assignment they gave to hopefuls who never made it past the first cut. _What a shame,_ everyone said when the news broke. Renjun chose to focus on the facts: Donghyuck made it out. Jaemin didn't.

Chenle hits him with the back of his spoon. When he pulls away there’s a glob of kiwi juice on Renjun’s shoulder blade. “Wonder what he’s doing back here,” Chenle says, just as Renjun reaches over to smack him.

There could be many reasons why Donghyuck is making his grand return to Shanghai now—maybe he finally got enough clearance to teach, or he's switched tracks to specialize in assault tactics. Better yet, maybe he's just taking a look around. Felt nostalgic, or something. Renjun tries not to read into it.

But years of training have hardwired the language into his brain, taught him to gut a man without moving a single muscle. Even now he can see it out of the corner of his eye: Donghyuck shaking hands with Marshal Kim, nodding along attentively at the haphazard tour Jisung’s giving, his lip curled the same way as all those years ago when he’d body-slammed Renjun onto the mats of the combat room so hard Renjun’s shoulder gave out. 

It can't be any clearer: Shanghai needs a defender, and Renjun needs a co-pilot.

Fucking karma.

“I’m not piloting with him,” Renjun says, hands firm as they curl around the edges of his chair. 

Marshal Kim pushes back from his desk, eyes bleary. Now Renjun feels kind of bad—he hadn’t even tried to make small talk beforehand. Just barged into the room and hoped for some favoritism. Jury’s still out on whether or not it’ll work.

“The algorithm paired you two together. There’s potential here, if you’re willing to try.” Marshal Kim pauses to rub at his eyes. In this moment he looks about ten years older than he actually is—not that Renjun would ever tell him that. 

"I don't need to," he replies. "I already know."

Marshal Kim makes a long-suffering expression. “Who do you want it to be, then? Shin, maybe? Choi? Liu?”

Renjun feels his face burn, almost like a thermometer for shame. As if all it took was one look and everyone knew instantly about the endless days he’d spent in the combat room, walking away each time just as partnerless as before. He couldn’t even bring himself to feel good about all the final scores being tipped in his favor. Some Ranger he’d be, if he couldn’t sync up with anyone in the Drift.

Still—Donghyuck.

“I’m not piloting with him,” Renjun repeats.

Marshal Kim surveys him for a moment, eyes locked onto Renjun’s so intensely it feels like he's being turned inside out. He holds still, gives as good as he’s got. Something fragile hangs in this balance.

Eventually Marshal Kim looks away. “They want to move you to Conn-Pod.”

“What?"

“They think you should do something useful—design conflict scenarios, or something. Otherwise you’re a waste of resources.” He gestures at the email sitting open on his screen. “Their words, not mine.”

Grounded before takeoff. Renjun's taken a million personality tests, breezed through all his K-Science labs, done more Pons simulations than he can count. None of it will matter if he never gets to see the inside of a jaeger.

"Can you negotiate with them?"

Marshal Kim gives him a wry look. "Why do you think Lee's here?"

"Okay," Renjun starts. Closes his eyes. "It's just—"

The events of that night inadvertently press themselves up against the back of his eyelids, bursts of color rearranged into memory. Renjun shoving Donghyuck into the wall. The quiet acquiescence that followed. Sheets bunched up underneath them. Donghyuck’s eyes as he came, boring into Renjun’s own. It’d been four years since and Renjun could still remember the way Donghyuck’s hand found his in the dark, warm, in all that stillness.

“The situation isn’t as hopeless as it seems,” Marshal Kim says, yanking Renjun back to the present. His gaze is steady but forgiving.

Renjun toys with his fingers. “I never knew you were such an optimist.”

“I’m not.” Marshal Kim pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looks at Renjun, calm. “But I think you have options, still.”

Truthfully, Renjun shouldn’t even be worrying about potential co-pilot matches when he hasn’t passed all of his final evals yet. He has a ways to go: basic engineering, Kaiju anatomy, physical endurance, mental control—but he’ll get there. He’s trained his whole life for this.

In the meantime, Donghyuck’s been keeping his distance. Renjun doesn’t know if it’s intentional or not—Donghyuck’s clearance nosedived after he got relocated and now he's engaged in a slow, uphill battle to get it back. Until then, Renjun is safe in virtually every part of the Shatterdome.

“You’re avoiding me,” someone says from behind him.

Except the break room. He turns around to find Donghyuck leaning up against the doorway, looking so natural it almost hurts. He’s taller now, Renjun notes, and slimmer too. Finally dropped the baby fat. Renjun ignores the slight stirring in his chest and turns back to his tea.

“How could you tell?”

Donghyuck laughs. "Hard not to notice when my co-pilot—”

"Not your co-pilot."

“—doesn’t show up to any of our required practices.” From the sound of it, Donghyuck’s crossing his arms. “What’s your deal?”

Renjun snorts. “You’re not really asking me that.”

“Oh, I am.”

He turns around to find Donghyuck already looking at him. A vaguely familiar sense of unease ripples through him, followed closely by nausea. Donghyuck has always had a way of disarming others without words. Renjun just hasn’t been on the receiving end of it in a while.

He looks away before Donghyuck can say anything else. “I’m not talking about it with you.”

“You won’t talk to me about anything,” Donghyuck says, rolling his eyes. “What, are you saving it for the Drift? Want our first time to be special? Oh, wait—”

Renjun sets the kettle down harder than he has to. “We’re not Drifting together.”

Donghyuck scoffs but doesn’t say anything more, letting the silence between them grow. Renjun would leave now, if he could, but he likes to steep _biluochun_ for a little longer than necessary. No real flavor otherwise.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can still feel Donghyuck watching him. Renjun used to drag them all out to the street markets whenever he could, early in the mornings when all the commercial districts were still recovering from the night before and the tea aunties could set up shop undisturbed. After Jaemin started drinking coffee, Donghyuck went with Renjun the most. He hated the Shanghai humidity and yet he was still there each Saturday, waiting for Renjun by the door before his alarm went off. He claimed he had nothing better to do.

Right now under the shitty break room light, Donghyuck looks just as expectant as he did all those years ago.

“It’s been so long,” he says quietly.

The tea's ready. Renjun takes it and exits without another word.

The academy groups its recruits by talent—perverse, for an institution so rooted in hierarchy, but it'd worked to Renjun's advantage. He entered the program after its first trimester and worked his way up systematically, took to weaponized assault with unparalleled ease, could soon rattle off the names of all fifty-two forms of Jaeger Bushido in his sleep. He was on track to graduate in just under four months until the UN did an abrupt one-eighty and cut any further funding for the program, citing a lack of concrete results. The PPDC sent Jung Yunho out to curry favor with the public in hopes of creating pressure, but until then there was nothing any of them could do but wait, train, and hope someone got grievously injured enough to retire.

It forced Renjun to actually get to know the people he'd spent months training to defend humanity with: Mark, who the fightmaster constantly used as an example for the rest of them; Jeno, who secretly wanted to go into psych analysis but didn't out of a self-enforced sense of duty; Jaemin, who'd perfected his PR smile at fourteen and now used it to coax extra _youtiao_ from the canteen ladies at breakfast; and Donghyuck, who'd always given Renjun the distinct impression that he was running a Ponzi scheme they were all unwillingly participating in.

(Renjun never got around to deciding on the specifics, but Jaemin was convinced that Donghyuck dealt exclusively in sexual favors.

"Just look at those legs," he'd marveled once after Donghyuck got out of the shower. Donghyuck pretended to drop his towel in response.

"Decency!" Mark hissed, slapping a hand over his eyes and Jeno's too, for good measure. "Have mercy!")

It was the kind of friendship that was contingent on situation, one that ebbed and flowed as the end of the world hurtled toward them and they all became increasingly more aware that they were each other’s ticket out. 

Nothing exacerbated this more than the academy-sponsored push to find your Drift-compatible partner, and quick, before they were snatched up by someone else and you got stuck double-checking jaeger stats down in J-Tech. The tides had changed—Jung Yunho’s media play succeeded. Mark was first to go, then Jeno. Jaemin and Donghyuck tested compatible for each other. The one person Renjun thought he could pilot with chose someone else. He locked himself in the combat room, pummeled every single trainee into the ground, and it still wasn't good enough.

Jaemin kept him company sometimes. “You’ll find them, Renjun-ah,” he’d said, a hand reaching out to grab at Renjun’s shoulder. His grip was loose, but Renjun felt it all the same. “I know you will.”

Two weeks later, Renjun was the only one left at the academy.

"Make it more obvious, would you?" Yangyang swings down from the chin-up bar anchored across their doorway, shirt tied around his neck. It leaves his torso exposed to everyone who walks past their room, but Renjun makes no move to cover him up. He’s pretty sure Yangyang likes the attention.

"What?"

"I asked you to spot _me,_ not Donghyuck's empty room across the hallway."

"I have been," Renjun protests. "You were on your fifth rep."

"Try fifteenth."

Well. He doesn't have anything to say to that.

“I keep thinking you’ve found out that I’m the one skimming _da bai tu_ off of you—which I’m not,” Yangyang adds hurriedly when Renjun starts glaring at him, “until I realized that you’re not looking _at_ me but _behind_ me. And that’s just rude.” Yangyang chooses to make his displeasure known by balling his shirt up and chucking it at Renjun's face. He misses.

“Maybe you should do your chin-ups somewhere else,” Renjun suggests.

“Maybe you should get laid,” Yangyang shoots back. He looks pointedly over his shoulder at Donghyuck’s room.

Renjun ignores that implication and asks, “What’s he up to? He’s been gone for a while.”

“Oh, you noticed?” 

At Renjun’s glare, Yangyang snickers but relents all the same. “He’s clearing evals. Can’t pilot without them.” After a moment’s consideration, he adds, “You can’t either, you know.”

Renjun shifts his weight onto the palms of his hands. Their instructors used to say that Drifting was about reciprocity. Anticipation as a reflex. Like picking up a book you've never read and already knowing the ending. This version of Donghyuck is sharper, the lines of his body fracturing upon themselves repeatedly, but a ghost of the framework is still there. If Renjun squints he can make out the outline of someone he used to know.

“Trust me,” he snorts. “I’m aware.”

Yangyang makes a face, shrugging. "Just saying."

Renjun and Donghyuck used to be sparring partners, at Jaemin’s suggestion. 

("I mean, Donghyuck kicks your ass, and then you come here and camp out until you can kick _his_ ass, and vice versa. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just practice against each other?" Jaemin moved back on the bench and watched Renjun have another go at the punching bag. "Unless this is a sex thing. Is this a sex thing?"

"It could be," Donghyuck winked obnoxiously, arms wrapped around the punching bag to hold it still. "If you wanted it to—ow, Renjun! That was my hand!"

"Oops," Renjun said, and punched him again.)

They hadn’t expected to actually follow through with it—sparring with someone outside of your algorithm-approved Drift partner was almost an omen. Could doom you to an eternity of being a lone Ranger, literally. Everyone knew Doyoung hadn’t become a Marshal by choice.

Superstition hadn’t stopped Donghyuck though. “What,” he’d smirked, shoving Renjun over to make room for himself at the table. “You scared?”

“Of your twig arms?” Renjun gave him an unimpressed look. “Not in the slightest.”

“You say that now, but these twigs are going to pound you into the mats,” Donghyuck sang.

Jaemin’s eyes lit up. “So it _is_ a sex thing!”

At that the conversation had abruptly dissolved into adamant refutations (Renjun) and sleazy grins (Donghyuck), but the idea had already wormed its way inside of their heads.

“It’s not like we have anything better to do,” Donghyuck said, wrapping tape around the palms of his hands. “You ready?”

Renjun resolved to land the first hit. One strike and he got Donghyuck on the underside of his chin, a muted _thump_ when his staff made contact. Donghyuck’s eyes flashed as he returned the favor with a blow to Renjun’s ribs. Renjun subsequently lashed at Donghyuck’s knees.

“Two-one,” he called, waiting for Donghyuck to pick himself up off the ground. “Can you at least try?”

Donghyuck flipped him onto his back in one motion. “Why don’t you?”

 _Know your enemy,_ their fightmaster was fond of saying, _and the rest will come naturally._ Renjun knew Donghyuck and still they lunged and struck and parried until their movements blurred any lines of distinction between them, each step a mirror image of itself. By the time the sun came up, the score was still tied.

But they’d both felt it—livewire stretched out, tension palpable, a conversation visualized. Renjun thought back to each step, each action, each instinct. There’d been a reckoning passed between them, even if neither of them said it out loud. They hadn’t needed to.

“It’s us,” he’d said with a grin, grabbing onto Donghyuck’s shoulders when they’d left the room. 

Donghyuck had slipped out from under Renjun’s hold to walk the other way. Strange, given that they lived in the same dorm. “I guess it is.”

Renjun dreamed about it for days on end. Electricity running a thread through them both, a tacit understanding transliterated from the mats of the combat room to a neural handshake inside the confines of a jaeger two hundred feet out at sea. He’d been about to ask the Marshal, too, until two days later the next pair of pilots was announced and Donghyuck’s name was called right after Jaemin’s.

It’d stung more than he cared to admit. Felt like a pin speared through his body, butterfly trapped behind the glass. So when Donghyuck stopped talking to him Renjun did the same. Didn’t say anything even when he left, wished Jaemin well and pointedly ignored his ever-so-conspicuous co-pilot.

Sometimes he still imagines what could’ve been, in the quiet of his room. Other times he remembers Tokyo and feels that dream dissolve upon itself. 

And yet even now there are times Donghyuck looks back at him, while reaching for a slice of watermelon at the canteen, or across the weight racks in the gym, or through the gap of their doorways, and it feels so, so real. Like all Renjun has to do is let himself go. Like it's that easy to forget.

"Why didn't you answer my texts," Renjun whines as the call connects, phone angled purposefully upward so that his face is hidden from view.

Jeno's pixelated shoulders shrug unapologetically. "They weren't that funny."

“Wow,” someone says on the other end of the line, “if even Jeno doesn’t think you’re funny then you must’ve really messed up.”

Jeno squawks. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Hello to you too, Yeeun," Renjun grumbles, tilting the phone back down.

Her face pops up on the screen, smile at complete odds with the glaring paparazzi photos that Renjun usually sees her in. She's one of the pilots with the most dedicated followings—gap charms, Jeno claims—which only serves to increase the amount of cameras pointed her way. In their calls though, she's as sunny as ever.

"I heard that somebody's got a co-pilot now." Yeeun says, winking at Renjun. "What's that all about?"

"Who told you?"

"Jeno, who heard it from—"

“The Marshal,” Renjun finishes. “I should’ve known.”

Yeeun makes a face, like, _what can you do._ “Doyoung tells Jeno everything.”

“And it’s all anyone’s talking about,” Jeno adds, as if that’s any better. “Anything Donghyuck does still makes headlines—especially when it’s news that he could be piloting again.”

Renjun swallows, hard. He’d known that the moment Donghyuck stepped foot in the Shanghai Shatterdome again. Still, he thought he had time.

"So?" Yeeun prompts when Renjun doesn’t say anything for a while. "What's it like?"

Renjun blinks. "What's what like?"

"Drifting with Lee Donghyuck," she says, an implicit _obviously_ tacked on at the end. "Is he as good as they all say?"

"Well," Renjun begins, making eye contact with Jeno. "I don't actually know."

"You haven't done it yet," Jeno surmises.

"No."

"How come? Anyone would jump at the chance to pilot with him." Yeeun pats Jeno's shoulder after a moment, as if she's just realized what she's saying. "No offense. He's a catch."

Jeno grins brightly up at her. "None taken."

"Anyway," Yeeun continues, turning back to Renjun. "I'm sure you have your reasons. Still, if it ever happens..."

"I'll tell you," he promises.

Yeeun nods in satisfaction and turns to leave, apologizing on her way out. She's already late for a meeting. Jeno waves goodbye, then adjusts the phone to look at Renjun directly.

"You know I still keep in touch with Donghyuck," he says.

“I do.” Renjun clears his throat. “Has he… said anything? About me?”

Jeno takes a moment to respond, mouth opening and closing as he works through various answer configurations. Renjun would laugh if his question weren’t so loaded.

“Yeah,” Jeno finally says. “He has.”

“Then I guess you’ll try to talk me into piloting with him.”

Jeno shakes his head. "Actually, I wanted to know if you were okay."

Something aches inside his chest, tender. A phantom response he hadn’t been aware he had. "I don't know," Renjun says after a moment. "It hurts just to look at him sometimes. He’s like this—this walking reminder of everything that happened. And now I have to share my mind with him?” He laughs, bitter. "That's just grand."

"You don't trust him."

"No," Renjun frowns. "I don't."

A memory floats unbidden to the forefront of his mind: the academy, four years ago, Renjun too caught up in a phone call with his mom to get to dinner on time, signalling at Donghyuck when the other had walked by to save him a piece of mooncake, if he could.

He had. The filling was red bean, and even though Renjun grumbled that red bean was too sweet for anyone who wasn’t Jaemin and that his favorite had always been lotus, he’d eaten the whole thing anyway. Donghyuck had smiled at him, pleased in spite of the scolding, and for a moment Renjun's heart caught in his throat.

Jeno looks at him now in almost the same way. "I don’t think that’s true."

On paper Renjun was the perfect recruit.

Mark used to hold that mantle, before he was deployed to Los Angeles and started tag-teaming Kaiju with Hong Kong's Wong Yukhei. Back when the PPDC had been scrambling for funds, rumor had it they'd already promised Mark a spot on the next plane out. They were that sure of him.

(Mark always insisted that it wasn't true, that matching perfectly with his first algorithm-calculated partner was a stroke of luck. That was just how Mark was.)

Renjun's getting there—he's second to none in the combat room alone—but Drifting isn't as transparent. There's no evidence of progress; it can't be quantified by miles run or hours logged. Trust is flighty, shy, even. You could do everything right and still choke in the moment.

Dr. Jung fiddles with the monitor. "Your results are standard," she reads off the screen, monotone.

Renjun shifts in his seat. No one really likes Dr. Jung, on account of her tendency to stare at them like she's constantly calculating the speed at which they'd react if she pulled a knife on them, but she’s also the only one who has enough clearance to administer their final psych tests. Probably because everyone else in the department is too scared to do anything about it.

"Sorry, that's a lie." She leans in closer. "Your frontal lobe is lighting up. Any guesses as to why?"

Renjun looks blankly at her. She keeps her eyes glued to the screen.

"…Isn't that your job? To tell me why?"

"Yes," she replies evenly.

He blinks, then mentally pulls up a copy of his last screening results. “It could be that I’m hyper-fixated on staying in control,” he recites. That was the feedback he usually got—so focused on restraint that he went all the way around the bend and was volatile again, compromised compatibility for personal comfort, lost sight of his ultimate objective. It was the kind of red flag that could get you kicked out, if you weren’t careful. Renjun thought he’d dealt with it already.

“New reasons for new activity,” Dr. Jung says, looking pointedly at the screen.

He feels his face flush. Right. She can see his record too. 

He calculates an approximation of the truth and tells it to her. “It’s likely my new… partner,” he decides, disliking the connotations of the word but lacking a better alternative.

Dr. Jung nods. “It’s my understanding that you trained with Ranger Lee?”

“We were friends.”

“You have to balance three different relationships to Drift successfully—your connection to your co-pilot, your connection to the Drift, and your connection to yourself.” Dr. Jung looks downwards at her notes. “Perhaps your relationship with him isn’t strong enough yet.”

Renjun frowns, considering. “I’ve always been better with physical connections.”

"Likely because you can visualize them." Dr. Jung makes eye contact with him for the first time that day. "A sparring match is concrete. Trust is not."

“It’s not even that,” Renjun mutters. “I do trust him.”

Saying it out loud stings, antiseptic on a cut, but the truth has never been palatable. The history is already there: seven years since they began at the academy together, four years since Donghyuck last sparred with him, two years since Jaemin died. Radio silence ever since.

“And yet?”

"I don't want to," he confesses.

Dr. Jung regards him carefully. She doesn’t know Donghyuck beyond any official capacity, but she doesn’t need to. She knows Renjun.

“I can’t recommend you to pilot,” she says after a moment.

His stomach flips. This is exactly what he wanted—an academy-certified reason to get out of piloting with Donghyuck—and yet it still feels like a punch to the gut, bruise swelling right beneath the skin. History holds history holds history.

Renjun turns to leave, thinks about the jaegers sitting empty in the hangar. One of them could’ve been his.

“I heard the news,” Donghyuck says, tracking Renjun down in the canteen the day after. He’s holding a plate of honeydew in one hand and two forks in the other.

Grudgingly, Renjun takes the bait. “Come here to gloat?”

Donghyuck rolls his eyes, setting the plate down on the table between them. “If you can’t pilot then neither can I, idiot.”

"Sucks to be you."

Donghyuck opens his mouth, a retort no doubt at the tip of his tongue, before he thinks better of it. "Can I sit down?"

"No," Renjun says, just to be difficult.

Donghyuck sits down anyway. The canteen, thankfully, has long since emptied out—no one’s still eating lunch at three in the afternoon when evals are coming up next week. Except Renjun. And Donghyuck, too. 

“It’s really good,” Donghyuck mumbles after a moment, nudging the plate of honeydew toward him. “You should have some.”

“How do I know you haven’t poisoned it?” Renjun asks, only half-jokingly.

Donghyuck shrugs and eats another piece, as if to say, _your call._ Renjun watches him in spite of his best efforts not to. The honeydew really does look good, so sweet that it’s more white than green, the kind that cleaves itself properly under a knife. Jilin’s climate was too cold to sustain it, so when Renjun had first arrived at the academy it was all he would eat. He’s surprised Donghyuck remembers.

He doesn't let it show, though. "Did you come here just to eat?"

"It's the canteen," Donghyuck shoots back. "What, am I not allowed to?"

Renjun gets up to leave.

“Okay, fine.” Donghyuck sighs and sets his fork down, the sound of it clattering between them. "I actually wanted to talk to you too."

Renjun hesitates but sits back down in the end.

“I know how unfair it feels to lose a chance to pilot. Like, it’s the end of the fucking world. What does the PPDC have to lose?” Donghyuck does his best Marshal Kim impersonation, which, now that Renjun’s hearing it again after all this time, also sounds stunningly similar to his Mark impersonation: “Stay out of trouble, Donghyuck. A reckless pilot might as well be a dead one.” Donghyuck drops the act to sigh in exasperation. “You’d think I’d know that, especially after Tokyo. But they put me on house arrest anyway. I thought I was going to die.”

“You were decommissioned,” Renjun interrupts. “You got to pilot, at least.”

Donghyuck levels a glare at him. “It’s still hard, okay? When I first got moved to Conn-Pod control I was so mad I made all the Kaiju commit suicide.”

Renjun wrinkles his nose. “In the simulations? Then what’s the point?”

“I didn’t want anyone else to kill them if I couldn’t. Even virtually.” Donghyuck shrugs, the tips of his ears going red. “It’s stupid but true. It was just—every day, another city got blown to bits. And every day, all I did was watch the replay on channel 5. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

Renjun blinks, trying to put the pieces together. “Are you trying to comfort me?”

Donghyuck makes an aborted sound in the back of his throat. “Well, I’m generally not in the practice of recounting my embarrassing coping mechanisms for small talk.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to refuse—”

“Stop trying to be Jaemin,” Renjun snaps.

One blow and Donghyuck crumples. Literally—he staggers backwards, almost folding in on himself, reducing the surface area within striking range, curling around anything vulnerable. If they’d been sparring Donghyuck would’ve pressed his staff against Renjun’s throat to shut him up. Right now he barely manages to stumble to his feet.

“He was my friend too,” he says, a little indignantly.

Renjun doesn’t respond. The words are already out there: Venn diagram of pain, Jaemin the overlap. Each exchange like jabbing at a still-tender bruise. Salt meeting wound.

If they’d met again under kinder circumstances, if jaegers didn’t fall like dominoes every other day, if Jaemin had been recovered from the water in time, if Donghyuck had chosen to pilot with Renjun all the way back then—

There’s no time for _what ifs_ at the end of the world. Even still, Renjun can’t help but hope.

Renjun used to plot out the trajectory of his life against the steady de-evolution of Jaemin’s coffee order. It was a more reliable form of measurement than it seemed—a little bit like calculus, even, if calculus had caffeine instead of derivatives and Renjun could be reluctantly tolerant of Jaemin’s antics instead of extraordinarily bitter about never being able to graph a tangent curve. 

(Even Mark couldn’t find a way to graduate high school and save the world at the same time. Math was truly everyone’s Achilles’ heel.)

 _The Drift never holds back,_ Taeyong had told them the first time they’d been let into LOCCENT to witness a test Drift, smiling as they clustered up against the glass. _You need to find a way to ground yourself._

So Renjun fixated on Jaemin. Jaemin’s coffee. Same thing.

Those were the early days of the program, when the Kaiju were still Category IIs at worst and the only criticism the PPDC ever got was about how they were cheating the public out of seeing Ranger Jung’s face 24/7. Between sparring practice and J-Tech electives, Jaemin started drinking coffee alongside tea, Mark got hooked on basketball, Jeno tried to sneak his cats in one by one, Donghyuck wouldn’t stop making them all take trashy "Are You and Your Crush Drift-Compatible?" quizzes, and Renjun felt far, far away from the intricate guesswork of saving the world. They had so long to go. So much could happen along the way.

Like the smallest, most traitorous of crushes after Jaemin upped his caffeine dosage and switched from lattes to americanos. Renjun watched him suck noisily on his straw and thought first about how pink his lips looked instead of the seven different ways he could use that straw to save his life if he were ever marooned on a desert island.

“Jaemin?” Donghyuck wrinkled his nose when Renjun let it slip. “Bad idea. No—horrible, actually.”

Renjun scowled and looked away. “It’s a lapse of judgement. I’ll get over it.”

“No,” Donghyuck interrupted, waving him aside. “Jaemin can cook but he only knows how to make three things, he’s lactose intolerant, probably, and he’s clingy. Awful choice all around.”

And yet Renjun had carried that torch through twenty-three Kaiju attacks, through the news of Mark’s first assignment in Hong Kong, through Jaemin’s funeral service, through—

Renjun stands alone in the break room. He hasn’t had coffee in two years. It felt like a personal affront, somehow, like if he even thought about it Jaemin might walk through the door and scold him for prematurely destroying his stomach lining. _I’m already too far in,_ he’d protest, holding his coffee out of reach whenever Renjun tried to steal a sip. _But there’s hope for you still!_

Renjun pours out the coffee beans, dumps them into the machine, and waits.

Marshal Kim calls them both into his office first thing in the morning. It’s five AM, which is always a hellish time of day, but it feels especially hellish knowing that Donghyuck somehow looks more presentable than he does. Renjun leans over discreetly and gets a whiff of musk. Momentarily, he’s impressed—Donghyuck used to say that sweat was the only cologne someone as naturally gorgeous as himself needed. Renjun had slapped him and dragged him to Nanjing Road anyway.

“We’re bringing in temporary reinforcements,” Marshal Kim says, dropping a sheaf of papers onto his desk to punctuate the statement. Renjun gets a brief glimpse as they fall. “Tokyo said they could spare a team, so one’s coming in today.”

Donghyuck’s smile doesn’t fully reach his eyes. “That’s great.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook,” Marshal Kim adds, staring directly at Renjun as he says this. Renjun pretends not to notice.

“You two were close before, according to the reports. I expect both of you to resolve whatever conflicts that may have developed since, yes?”

Donghyuck doesn’t even try to smile this time. “Of course.”

"Renjun?"

The truth is, he wants to pilot so badly it almost hurts. Wants to know how it feels to give yourself away so completely, blatantly, under the pretense of honesty. After so many years it seems only fair.

He knows Donghyuck feels the same; Renjun’s caught him lingering sometimes. Hanging around the combat room, eyeing the criss-crossing catwalks of the hangar longingly, the same ache in both of their hearts. In those moments Renjun had thought he could reach out and touch him, say something, clear the air. Understanding wound between them like a tightrope. A few words to cross it.

“Okay,” he says, voice almost unrecognizable to his own ears. Like it’s been fed through a translator and read back to him. 

Donghyuck startles at the sound of it but stiffens immediately afterward, as if telling himself off for reacting. The lines of his shoulders form perfect ninety degree angles. Renjun scolds himself for the way his heart jumps in response. Who the hell gets turned on by _geometry?_

“What do you want us to do?” Donghyuck asks, spine ramrod straight.

Something twinkles in Marshal Kim’s eyes. “Well,” he begins.

Turns out Marshal Kim’s idea of conflict resolution is to force them into rooming together. He claims it’ll build camaraderie— _think of it like a pre-Drift,_ he’d argued, _a kind of readjustment period with no consequences._

Renjun looks at Donghyuck’s pajamas strewn haphazardly on the bottom bunk and begs to differ. 

“I usually sleep there,” he says, pointing.

Donghyuck doesn’t even spare him a glance. “Thought you always wanted to be on top,” he leers.

“Fine,” Renjun snaps, ignoring the flush spreading down the back of his neck. “I’ll go up.”

By the time he’s fully moved in Donghyuck’s nowhere to be found. Renjun pauses for a moment, playing spot-the-difference with his memory of the place five minutes ago, before he registers only one pair of shoes by the doorway and realizes that Donghyuck’s probably out for a walk. He doesn’t know if that’s something Donghyuck does now. It seems silly not to consider it, at least, in the wake of everything else that’s happened. Renjun never thought that Jaemin would die.

Predictably, their living arrangement goes about as well as you’d expect, which is to say not well at all. It’s three weeks of constant bickering over who gets the nicer toothbrush (Renjun), who keeps forgetting to turn the lights off (Donghyuck), who needs to plead with Doyoung to reconsider (Renjun), and who has worse sparring technique between the two of them.

“You don’t even stretch beforehand,” Renjun said, on their way back from practice.

“I don’t need to,” Donghyuck replied, skipping ahead of him in the hallway. “Not when I’m going against you.”

Renjun answered that with a headlock, to which Donghyuck responded by socking him in the arm, so Renjun then reached up to grab a fistful of Donghyuck’s hair. They kept at it until someone cleared their throat pointedly behind them and they turned around to find Dr. Jung’s distinctly unimpressed face staring back at them. _A rematch,_ they agreed once they were back in the safety of their room, _tomorrow._

“He’s so exhausting,” Renjun mumbles against a tabletop in the canteen afterward. Donghyuck had fought a lot dirtier than expected. Renjun’s entire body now felt sore to the touch.

Chenle hums nonchalantly as he stabs his straw through his yogurt. “Isn’t that your fault, ge?”

Renjun raises his head just enough to glare.

“I mean,” Chenle shrugs, “you’re the one still putting up with him day after day.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Renjun gripes. He lifts his head and feels some kind of residue smeared across his cheek. He reaches up to wipe it off. “Doyoung’s refusing to change his mind. We’re stuck with each other.”

“Well if you’re supposedly _stuck_ with each other,” Chenle parrots, mockingly. “At least you’re a Ranger now, right? Is it everything you dreamed and more?”

Renjun freezes, mind blank. He’s not a Ranger by any measure—if he were, he’d have been out on the water last week alongside Tokyo’s Echo Saber. He’d watched only in slight jealousy as Seulgi and Yerim fielded questions at the press conference afterward with practiced ease. Slight, because Renjun himself was notoriously awful at image control, talked to reporters like he was trying to one-up them at all times. Mediaplay had always been Jaemin’s forte. Donghyuck’s too, now that he thinks about it.

Chenle chucks his now-empty yogurt bottle at him. “Renjun?”

He brings up a hand to scratch at the back of his neck. “It’s fine,” he says. 

“Oh, that’s convincing.”

“You’ll understand when you get there.”

“Shut up,” Chenle crows, shoving him off the bench entirely. “Your ego is so big now. And from what? One month of being a _real_ pilot? You’ve changed,” he throws his head back, hand pressed melodramatically against his forehead. “I don’t even recognize you anymore.”

Renjun snickers and reaches out to pinch his cheek. The thing is, Chenle’s still new—he’d joined not because he needed to fulfill his military service (Jaemin) or because he’d decided that the only way to work through Kaiju-related childhood trauma was to face them head-on (Donghyuck), but simply because he’d wanted to. That kind of open innocence is rare in wartime. Renjun wants to preserve it while he still can.

“Don’t forget me when you’re famous,” Chenle fake-sobs into his hands.

Renjun laughs, warmed by the gesture in spite of the winter chill. “I would never.”

He hasn’t been fully cleared to pilot yet but he’s to undergo a test Drift with Donghyuck in three days anyway, as some sort of confirmation bias ceremony for the PPDC. They’ve known about it for a while—a week, at least—but time seems to pass differently in the Shatterdome. It’s almost like having to look at a gigantic doomsday clock that reports an ever-dwindling number of Kaiju-free days any time you pass by LOCCENT fucks with your perception of time. Who knew?

Not Donghyuck, apparently.

“Three days?” he asks, with a hesitance that’s unbecoming.

Renjun squints. “They told us this already?”

“I know. But—”

“What,” Renjun says, feeling a slow grin start to spread across his face. “Are you scared?”

Donghyuck gives him a look that makes him feel approximately two inches tall. “Have you ever considered that I don’t want you in my mind?”

“I don’t want you in mine either,” Renjun retorts.

“Still.”

There’s a lengthy pause, as Donghyuck visibly recalibrates himself again.

Renjun beats him to it though. “Aren’t you supposed to be the experienced one between the two of us?”

Donghyuck glares but lets the issue drop. Appropriately chastised, or so Renjun would like to think. The way he worries at his bottom lip tells Renjun that there's something more at stake, something he's not saying.

No need to pry it out of him now though. Renjun will find out in the Drift.

First, though, they have a month’s worth of training sessions to catch up on. Renjun spent Donghyuck’s first few weeks at the Shatterdome strategically avoiding him and subsequently their scheduled practices, and now he was paying dearly for it.

Donghyuck whacks Renjun on the shoulder with his staff. “Pay attention to me,” he whines, reaching out with his staff again.

Renjun uses the momentum of Donghyuck's upward swing to twist himself around. “Like that?”

It’s been years since they last sparred but the feeling is still there—body language instinctive and habitual, running deeper than muscle memory alone. Sparring is about the give and take: balance, counterweight, action, reaction. Renjun can foresee every one of Donghyuck’s moves, a hazy apparition residing solely in his gut, each motion superimposed on top of the next one. As much as he hates to admit it, Donghyuck can probably do the same. Communication is always easier on the mats.

Donghyuck clicks his tongue when he levels his staff at Renjun’s throat. “You’re losing your touch.”

Renjun hooks his own around Donghyuck’s ankles and tugs, reversing their positions. “I could say the same about you.”

Aggression as foreplay. Renjun’s no stranger to it but something feels more electrified with Donghyuck, feels like every single one of his nerves is standing at attention in response, reminds him of a time long ago when he’d pressed Donghyuck into a mattress just to hear the sounds he’d make.

Renjun hefts his staff, narrows his eyes, and charges again.

Their test Drift is scheduled for a Sunday. In the end, it actually happens the Monday afterward—Donghyuck had mysteriously fallen ill the morning of, to which Marshal Kim had fixed him with a look but let him go nonetheless.

“Don’t freak out when the relay gel comes in,” Donghyuck says, as if he hadn’t faked a cold yesterday to get out of this. Today he’s noticeably more energetic, although the bags under his eyes tell a different story.

Renjun scowls. “I’m not dumb.”

Donghyuck fixes him with a look. “But you’re new.”

Renjun stares forward resolutely. His heart is beating in overdrive now that he’s actually in the suit. Makes everything feel more real, even though he was promoted over a month ago.

He opens his mouth to retort anyway, on the principle that whoever gets the last word wins, but before he can get there the system kicks in and the bridge forms, steady. 

Now he understands why everyone says not to chase the rabbit. Nothing is visually apparent in Donghyuck’s headspace, but there are just enough glimpses to know that something’s there. Like seeing the imprints of sunspots only for them to disappear when you open your eyes. 

Still, Renjun’s been trained for this. Focus on the link, not the memories.

The problem is that Donghyuck’s mind is _messy—_ Renjun can hardly find his way around the place, let alone think about calling out to Donghyuck on the other side of the Drift. He starts up a filing system, subconsciously: Donghyuck’s abysmal grades, filed under _unimportant._ Donghyuck’s hometown getting trampled on by Biantal, filed under _already known._ Donghyuck’s short-lived crush on Jeno after he went blond one summer, filed under _mildly interesting but strongly suspected._ Donghyuck’s last Drift with Jaemin—

Tokyo is colder than it seems. Kojiyama sprouts from just beyond the Aqua-Line but makes its way over toward them in a matter of minutes, its signature beeping insistently with each mile that it moves. By the time Chrome Brutus is out on the water, Kojiyama’s already on their doorstep.

They’re up against a truly mutilated fuck of a Kaiju with too many rows of teeth to count and a spiked tail to boot, so LOCCENT tells them to just fire the Plasmacaster as many times as they can. If they can get at least one good hit in, they’ll be golden.

It all happens methodically, like a screenplay: they guide it out towards the sea, away from civilization. It follows relentlessly. They fire up the Plasmacaster and aim. Jaemin shouts, _so long, motherfucker!_ Chrome Brutus rocks side-to-side from the impact of Kojiyama falling into the water. LOCCENT’s already celebrating, telling them to come back before all the good beer’s gone. Donghyuck quips back that there’s no such thing as good beer, _are you forty, Jungwoo?_ Jaemin tells him to shut up and start moving, making their way back to shore in slow, faltering steps. Then, Jungwoo’s over the comms, yelling _BEHIND_ —Kojiyama, blindsiding them with a punch to the gut, the kind of move that gets a slow-action replay on the news. 

The force of it is strong enough to breach the hull of their jaeger, an ugly burst of metal to the left of Conn-Pod. Their neural bridge shatters as they hit the water—or rather, as Jaemin hits the water. Donghyuck’s spinal clamp stays firmly rooted onto his suit, the pull of it making his brain rattle around inside his head, eventually slamming it against the inside of his helmet strong enough to knock himself out.

Renjun feels the impact of it right away, feels the water rush in to take Jaemin’s place next to him in the cockpit, feels the weight of it pressing in on all sides.

Distantly, he registers Donghyuck combing through his memories too—bypassing Renjun's years in Jilin playing poker with his grandmother to hone in on him at the academy, stuttering as Jaemin lifts his shirt to wipe away the sweat on his brow.

He flushes in response. He's warm, in spite of all the water around him. He's sinking now, hearing voices. Marshal Kim, in concern. Dr. Jung, nonplussed. Alarms.

He finds Donghyuck’s hand in the dark, reaches out, and resurfaces.

Shanghai is a hotbed for gossip—always has been, especially after the west forced their way in through trade deals and business partnerships and offshore bank accounts, taking care to leave just enough cultural authenticity for the city to be attractively exotic.

In short: there’s about a million reporters trying to swarm the Shatterdome after the news of their test Drift gets leaked.

They’re not getting shafted just yet, apparently—despite their poor performance overall there’d still been one moment of alignment, cohesion. Renjun reaching out for Donghyuck’s hand under the water, Donghyuck taking it; that’s enough promise for the PPDC not to scrap them just yet. Plus, the PR team would have had a tough time figuring out the angle to play for Donghyuck’s discharge back to Conn-Pod.

Renjun spends the rest of the day on the treadmill. Running is instinctive, almost. Putting one foot in front of the other, over and over and over again. He’s always been good at going through the motions: the kind of laser focus required for a one-track mind. The kind that gets you total control in the Drift. _Should_ get you total control in the Drift.

There’s a strange aftertaste in his mouth. Not relay gel, it’s been hours since their Drift, but Renjun still feels—something, in his mind. He pokes at it tentatively, running through a mental diagram of his brain in order to classify it, but therein lies the problem. It’s not something solid that he can put a name to. He reaches out for it, vision blurred underwater, and finds—

“You used up all the hot water.”

Donghyuck’s whining, petulant as he cowers under the showerhead. A laugh sounds on the other side of the shower curtain, almost condescending, if Renjun wasn't able to match the face to it immediately.

“Your fault for waking up late,” Jaemin snorts, unrepentant.

Donghyuck pokes his head out and finds Jaemin brushing his teeth, using his free hand to draw hearts on the steamed-up mirror. His hair’s pink—courtesy of a lost bet—and his posture’s slouched. 

“If _you_ hadn’t stayed up late Photoshopping Jaehyun’s abs for Doyoung’s birthday card then I would’ve actually gotten some sleep, so. In the end it’s your fault.”

Jaemin’s response cuts off halfway through, like a laugh track that’d been mistakenly played. Renjun’s already falling by the time he realizes it though. The safety key of the treadmill snaps back into place just as he does. One minute he’s in a cramped bathroom in Tokyo, the next he’s sprawled on his knees in the gym. Feels a bruise forming on his shin, slightly off-center. Hears the humming of the fluorescent lighting above his head, the treadmill grinding to a halt.

After a moment he picks himself off the floor and starts running again.

It happens again as he’s changing in the bathroom. And then again as he’s reaching for a pair of chopsticks in the canteen. Queuing up music on his phone. Walking through the hallways at night. Listening to Chenle chatter about his day. Again, and again, and again.

He knew that this was a possibility, one of those strange, unexplained side effects that comes with sacrificing your psyche to the mercy of Pons circuitry. Memories slipping away from their intended owners, diffusing through his skull the way a dream might. He gets mere glimpses from Donghyuck’s head each time, snatches of moments pulled from their places in history, but it’s enough to work out the context.

Donghyuck hasn’t said anything about his end of things. He actually hasn’t said anything at all; after their Drift he took to impersonating a stone wall whenever he and Renjun were in the same room. It runs counter to everything Renjun knows about him—back at the academy Mark used to pay Donghyuck in _dan ta_ to shut up—but maybe that’s the point. Renjun doesn’t know him that well after all.

Still, he’s trying. He lounges on his bed, staring straight up at the ceiling, working to drown out the white noise coming from the hallway. After a couple days of being periodically sent into the past at the slightest of actions, Renjun’s instinct for control reorients itself and adjusts. The Drift is more malleable than you’d expect; if he focuses, he can feel the movement in his brain, sparks flying from points of contact, before he reaches out and finds—

He’s in the same room as before. It’s noticeably cleaner now: the bed’s been made, the clothes are back in their respective drawers, even the shelves look like they’ve been thoroughly dusted.

“What’s the occasion?” Donghyuck asks, perched against the doorway.

“Consider yourself,” Jaemin takes a lengthy pause to make a crude gesture. “Sexiled.”

“You dick,” Donghyuck says, but there’s no heat in it. “Don’t you dare fuck on my bed.”

Jaemin smirks. “Just for that, I think we will.”

Over the sound of the expletives Donghyuck’s releasing, Renjun pulls back for a moment, grounds himself in his own head. Not that the distinction exists at this point—everything is transmutable in memory—but it gives him an artificial sense of security. Processing emotions makes them easier to control. 

So Jaemin had hooked up with people in Tokyo. Renjun had stayed in touch with him all the way until the end and it’d never come up before. Still, the information is surprisingly easy to digest.

He gets better at it the more he practices—soon he can pick out a memory at will, pulling it from years and years of disuse to play out before him in 4K resolution. Watching and rewatching moments that he wants to commit to his own memory, even if what’s Donghyuck’s is already his. Transitive property and all.

Most of them revolve around Jaemin. Renjun doesn’t know if that’s purposeful or not, if the Drift is subconsciously picking up the intersection of his and Donghyuck’s fault lines and forcibly pulling them to the forefront of his mind.

 _The Drift has a will of its own,_ Taeyong used to say, when asked for advice on piloting.

Renjun thought he’d never see Jaemin again. Distorted like this, through the membrane of the Drift—he doesn’t know what to think.

After a week of giving Renjun the silent treatment, Donghyuck accosts him on his way into the changing room. “Stop using me as a fucking movie reel.”

Renjun sets his bag down on the bench. “What?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Donghyuck scowls. “You know what you’re doing.”

Renjun turns to his locker. “I really don’t.”

Donghyuck pauses long enough to give him a disbelieving look before barreling on. “Not everyone wants to watch Jaemin pick his nose on repeat, okay? You choose the most inconvenient times too. I’ll be in the middle of trying to take a piss and boom, Jaemin’s ugly mug is right in front of me.” Donghyuck stops, considering. “Actually, that might’ve helped.”

Renjun feels his brain physically kick into overdrive at the words—he knew that their neural link went both ways. It was a founding principle of the Drift, that you were never alone. Which meant that all the time Renjun spent in the past Donghyuck had been there too, sucked into a parallel timeline alongside him. The implications are dizzying. 

Still—

“I’m working through your memories,” he protests.

“My memories of _Jaemin,_ ” Donghyuck corrects. “Still not over him after all this time?”

“You don’t know me.”

“We were friends. I’m pretty sure—”

“Were,” Renjun emphasizes.

Donghyuck glares at him, head held high. “And? You haven’t changed in the slightest.”

“That’s not true,” Renjun snaps, but even as he says it the lie is apparent: it’s been four years since Donghyuck graduated and Renjun’s still stuck in Shanghai, stasis slowly becoming permanent. The memory of their first time sparring against each other floats back into his mind again.

Donghyuck’s mouth twists. “You’re still hung up on him.”

“Why do you keep bringing that up?”

“You’re not denying it.”

“This is ridiculous,” Renjun hisses, turning around so that he can jab a finger in Donghyuck’s face. “If you have an actual concrete reason to be upset with me— _not_ because I’m reviewing your memories, which I should be doing anyway as your _co-pilot,_ then you can come find me. Otherwise, get lost.”

“Yeah?” Donghyuck asks, chin lifted defiantly.

Renjun looks him right in the eye. “Yeah.”

In retrospect, he shouldn’t have issued that challenge. Donghyuck talks a big game, but it’s just that—game—unless his pride’s at stake too. Renjun should have known better, has known better, but years of disconnect will do that to you: force you to prioritize the things worth remembering and disregard the rest. If something slips through the cracks then there’s nothing you can do but hope it’ll come back on its own.

The first time it happens, Renjun’s walking back from the break room, steps unhurried so as not to spill the tea he’s holding, when he suddenly finds himself being pulled back to four years ago.

The Shatterdome had felt so new back then. He lifts his head and catches sight of himself—or rather, a younger version of himself, who thought JJ Lin was Singaporean Jesus and insisted on slicking his bangs back with hair gel every morning. His eyes widen as he starts piecing together the context: they’re all gathered around the entrance of the Shatterdome. Reporters are on stand-by outside. The contingent from Hong Kong is set to arrive any minute now, which meant that the news of Mark’s match had broken the night before, which meant that they would be the first co-pilot pair the PPDC had matched ever since they got their funding back.

Renjun knows what happens next. He tries to pull himself out of it, shuts his eyes, even, but the Drift doesn’t work like that. He reaches out instead, feels for the imprint he now knows he’ll find if he looks, and sure enough, senses Donghyuck’s amusement on the other end of their bond.

He grits his teeth. Younger Renjun mirrors the action, arms crossed as he registers Wong Yukhei, the Shatterdome’s newest occupant. Renjun watches the flush that paints itself over him, the stilted speech, the shaky knees. And then: Donghyuck sticking out a foot to trip him, the hand Renjun had extended for Yukhei to take now used to brace himself for impact. 

“I’m sorry about that,” he’d said, working vigorously to ignore Donghyuck’s snickers coming from beside him.

Yukhei waved him off with an easy smile. Renjun stared, transfixed by the size of his hands. “It’s okay, man!”

The scene in front of him ripples, changes to the interior of his elementary school in Jilin. Renjun realizes what Donghyuck is trying to do just as another version of himself, dressed up in an obnoxiously red hanbok, opens his mouth to sing. 

Presently, he cringes at the sound that comes out. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to mic a _kindergartener?_

He forcefully wrenches himself out of their shared headspace, tries to draw a boundary line in his head between what’s his and what’s Donghyuck’s. There’s no use, since everything is everyone’s, but he makes the effort anyway. Donghyuck is purposefully mining his memories for his worst moments. It’s so petty that he almost wants to laugh.

Instead, he thinks of their neural link—what does it mean for Donghyuck to have such control over his memories when it’s been weeks since they’d last been hooked up to Pons circuitry?

“The Ghost Drift,” Dr. Jung confirms when Renjun seeks her out after the nth time Donghyuck’s mentally brought up the Yukhei Incident. “It’s a side effect of the process. Unfortunately that’s about as much as we know.”

Renjun squints. “So the link is still there, even outside of the machinery.”

Dr. Jung nods. “It’s unusual that you both are demonstrating such control over it. But jaeger technology is still new.” She pauses to look thoughtfully at Renjun, in appraisal, almost. “Nothing is technically impossible.”

Most of the time Drift-induced flashbacks are processed through dreams. The science behind it, according to their psych department, is that Drifting naturally unearths everything worth hiding. In a last-ditch effort at humility, most of those memories are relegated to their subconscious. Even technology has ways of being kind.

Renjun doesn’t dream about Donghyuck for a while, but when he does it happens like this:

He’s standing outside of their dorms, back when they were still training for the future and hadn’t earned the luxury of privacy just yet. The door’s open but only Donghyuck’s in there. Belatedly, Renjun remembers the celebration banquet going on outside, just beyond the metal doors.

He barges in to demand, “What the fuck was that?”

Donghyuck doesn’t even spare him a glance.

“Why are you piloting with Jaemin now?” His tone feels acidic, even to him.

“Why can’t I?”

“Don’t you fucking dare. You know exactly what I mean.”

There’s a beat of silence, a pause in the music long enough for Donghyuck to turn toward him. His eyes are red-rimmed and his bottom lip’s been bitten to hell and back. “Yeah,” he says, voice smaller than what Renjun remembers it being. “I do.”

“I thought it was us,” Renjun says, heart feeling like it’s been juiced into mush. His throat clogs, briefly. “Didn’t you feel it too? Wasn’t that—compatibility?”

Donghyuck doesn’t respond. His face makes a series of movements in a quick succession, like it was wiping itself clean, almost. Unusually devoid of emotion.

“I don’t know,” Renjun continues, feeling desperate. “I just thought—”

Donghyuck cuts him off by surging forward and pressing their mouths together. 

It’s messy, like everything else Donghyuck does. Their teeth clack together first and there’s a dribble of spit working its way down Renjun’s bottom lip but Donghyuck’s hands are gentle where they hover at Renjun’s sides. Painfully so, in contrast. Almost as if he were in a museum, as if he could look but can’t touch, preemptively denying himself in some semblance of control. 

Renjun pulls back, stunned. Blurts, “I like Jaemin.”

Donghyuck rolls his eyes. “Shut up,” he mutters, before leaning in again.

“You’re not thinking straight,” Renjun tries to say, but the words get lost in the moment, swallowed up by a sweep of Donghyuck’s tongue. He closes his eyes and wills his heart to settle. He likes Jaemin.

At his non-reaction Donghyuck eventually slides their mouths apart, face flushed, lips shiny. “Can’t you let me have this once, Renjun?” He’s breathing heavily, the struggle of keeping blood pumping through his veins visible in the strain of his shoulders. With some effort he goes on, throat bobbing all the while. “Just once?”

Renjun opens his mouth to protest. This is Donghyuck, who goes to buy tea with him on their days off even though he hates leaving the Shatterdome. Donghyuck, who sat with him for hours when the list of survivors from Jilin came out and Renjun’s grandmother wasn’t among them. Donghyuck, who tells him over and over and over again that they’ll make it, they will—

Beneath the layers of hurt that’d formed after the next batch of co-pilot pairings were announced is an undercurrent of warmth, pulsing strongly in spite of Renjun’s best efforts to stop it. He’s known Donghyuck for years. If this is what he wants before he leaves then all Renjun can do is oblige.

“Okay,” he says, keeping his eyes downcast. “Okay.”

They start slowly. Renjun’s hooked up with someone before, that one time Ten took them out for drinks after the UN agreed to fund the PPDC again, but with Donghyuck each movement feels so much more pronounced. One hand sliding upward to the curve of his neck. The other slipping down to fiddle with his waistband. An open-mouthed kiss, pressed against the edge of his collarbone. Donghyuck’s movements are rushed and sloppy but there is so much inherent care that Renjun almost feels overwhelmed, like if he wasn’t careful enough he’d be swept away by the force of it.

“Fuck.” Donghyuck tips his head back as Renjun moves to his neck. “You have no idea,” he starts, breathing ragged, “no idea just how much I—”

Renjun doesn’t give him room to speak, waits for the rest of the words to dissolve into a moan as he works a hand around them both. The slide is so tight it’s almost painful—Donghyuck had been too impatient to use much lube—but it’s enough to get them off, a pleasant buzz starting to gather.

“Donghyuck,” he gasps, bracing himself against the wall, “Donghyuck, I’m going to—”

He startles awake with a jolt. Heart jumping, panting, the telltale beginnings of a hard-on building down below. For whatever reason, the ceiling feels so much closer to him than it did before. He flips over onto his side, pulls out his phone to read the time. Two sixteen in the morning. 

Fuck. He closes his eyes and tries to will it away, wants to get at least another four hours before he has to get up again. There’s something playing, in the background. If he focuses he hears—moaning, high-pitched and bright. The kind that’s soundtracked to bad porn. He reaches out through the link and immediately feels Donghyuck’s smugness permeate all thought, seeping into his consciousness without him even realizing it. He tries to quell a flare of rage, fails. Donghyuck had purposefully been trying to blueball him.

Renjun leans over the railing of their bunk to hiss, “You are such an asshole.”

“Yeah,” Donghyuck snarks, “you’d know.”

He turns onto his back with a scowl and stares back up at the ceiling again. He is so unbelievably hard. Donghyuck’s words don’t help, nor does the obnoxious moaning playing from his phone, because now Renjun can’t stop thinking about the way Donghyuck had grinded up against his thigh, mouth parting to let slip a series of breathless sounds.

But if he presses harder, sifts through the emotions that now ripple through him in waves, he finds his arousal slowly subsiding. It’d been too dark to see Donghyuck’s face clearly back then. Right now, with the added enhancement of their Drift, he can see: Donghyuck’s hand carding through Renjun’s hair, tender; the mark he’d left on the inside of Renjun’s wrist, bashful.

And Renjun realizes with a sudden and startling clarity that Donghyuck had been in love with him, is still in love with—

The moaning stops. Donghyuck shuffles around on his bed below him, each sound amplified in the stillness. Their connection goes both ways. Renjun knows that.

Despite his best efforts, he doesn’t get any sleep that night.

“Did you know?” Renjun asks as soon as the call connects, too impatient to wait for the _Connection Unstable_ warning to disappear. Jeno is probably smart enough to piece together the context.

“Know what?”

“That—” Renjun starts, heart in his throat. It still feels so unreal that during this whole time, while they’d sparred at the academy, while Donghyuck had been stationed in Tokyo, while Renjun treated him like a stranger in Shanghai, while they’d Drifted together—

“Donghyuck likes me.” A blooming in his chest, warm.

“Oh.” Jeno tilts his head to the side. “Well, yeah.”

Renjun lets out a series of splutters. One side of Jeno’s mouth quirks up in response.

“We kind of figured it was only a matter of time, after Donghyuck got assigned to Shanghai.”

“What?”

“You’re the last to know,” Jeno continues, nonchalant. “He told us back at the academy, under a blood oath. See? Here’s the proof.” He lifts his pinky to show Renjun the faint scar along the side.

“That’s concerning,” Renjun says, unsure of what he’s referring to.

Jeno hums to himself in response. “It’s nice that it’s all out in the open now. I feel like I’ve just paid off my mortgage, or something.”

“You don’t even have a mortgage.”

“I know.” Jeno winks. “That should tell you just how good I feel right now.”

Renjun rolls his eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Thanks,” Jeno says, pleased. And then, softer, “What are you going to do now?”

Think, probably. A _lot_. The morning afterward he’d woken up to find Donghyuck already gone. Clothes back in their places, bed made, for a change. Renjun found out over breakfast that he went back to sleeping in his old room.

(“You must’ve been a terrible roommate,” Chenle commented in between bites of his _mantou_. “And that’s coming from me.”)

It felt strange trying to exist in their shared room again—Renjun starts drumming his nails on the table just to hear more noise. It drives him crazy but he can’t help it. Needs it, even. Donghyuck has always taken up so much space.

Like in their dorm room at the academy, his tarot cards spilling over the carefully marked line Renjun drew on the floor space between their beds. At their table in the canteen, Donghyuck’s cheek resting against Renjun’s shoulder in spite of the full-length bench that they had to themselves. In the Drift, the strength of Donghyuck’s emotions pressing up against Renjun on all sides, water rushing in, tender, in spite of all that power.

Their connection goes both ways.

“It’s been years,” Jeno says, quietly.

Something sharp slams into Renjun’s chest. Donghyuck’s voice, disembodied, floating from Jeno’s mouth. 

“Yeah,” Renjun smiles. “It really has been.”

They once had an instructor who taught them stealth by locking them in a room full of mosquitos and not letting them out until they’d killed them all. Jaemin had wondered, very loudly, whether or not it was a ploy by the academy to get rid of the mosquito problem in the Shatterdome in a cost-effective way. He hadn’t gotten an answer. Regardless, they repeated the exercise every summer until it became tradition. Years later, awoken by that telltale buzz and three new angry welts on his arm, Renjun still can’t shake the habit. 

In the bunk below him, Donghyuck stirs too. Seems like he can’t shake it either.

(Renjun had asked him to move back in after a week—it was hard to sleep in such silence.)

The trick to killing mosquitoes was to sneak up on them. Keep the lights off, follow the sound of their buzzing. They flew out in the open then, lulled by a false sense of security. Renjun doesn’t blame them. Everyone is braver in the dark.

“Why did you choose Jaemin over me, all those years ago?”

For a moment he doesn’t think Donghyuck is going to respond. It was probably a bad time to bring it up. He’d only just come back to their room.

“You chose Jaemin over me too,” Donghyuck says.

Renjun's heartbeat quickens in his chest. “What are you talking about?”

“I liked you back then,” Donghyuck admits, frightfully honest. “I didn’t want you to find out when you were so clearly gone for Jaemin.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Guess that backfired.”

Renjun sucks in a deep breath. It is so, so quiet.

“I like you, right now.”

He reaches out to turn on the lights. Donghyuck is already looking at him, has already been looking at him, all this time. His eyes, shining. His cheeks, dusted pink. “Oh,” he says, his voice lilting upward by the force of his smile.

“Oh,” Renjun repeats, heart alight in his chest.

The Shatterdome is buzzing, restless, when Renjun retakes his final psych eval the next day. Maybe there’s something in the air—energy, caught by the wind, trapped in their corner of Shanghai’s coastline. He lets it carry him all the way to Dr. Jung’s office. Feels something new beating in his chest.

Her expression is carefully blank when he pushes open the door. Then, it gives way to a small smile. “You’re fully cleared to pilot now.”

Renjun feels his heart swoop momentarily. Piloting. Being out on the water. Trusting someone so instinctively, so completely, that they had to invent new technology to try and capture the essence of a bond that strong.

Dr. Jung makes a note on his report. “What changed?”

He thinks about the careful way Donghyuck had threaded their fingers together that morning, grip loose enough that Renjun could pull away if he wanted to. The flutter of his eyelashes, as he struggled to stay awake. The way he’d whispered into Renjun’s ear, gentle, as if the words might scare him away, _It’s you. It’s always been you._

“New reasons for new activity,” he says simply.

Dr. Jung smiles knowingly. “Congratulations, Ranger Huang.”

Ranger Huang. Just the sound of it causes something to bubble up in his chest, excitement so pure that each step he took afterward felt buoyed, almost. Like a fever, catching. Everything bright and lovely in the world, condensed down to two words. One boy.

“Why are you smiling so much,” Donghyuck huffs, curled up against Renjun’s side. Tomorrow they have a press conference to hold, a statement to release, registration to complete. Right now, they have each other. 

He reaches out for Donghyuck’s hand, revels in the ensuing blush. “No reason,” he says, voice light and clear. “No reason at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was truly a labor of love (emphasis on labor) so please let me know what you thought and/or come find me here! ⟶ [twitter](https://twitter.com/mythsick) / [cc](https://curiouscat.me/dedication)


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